On Saturday and Sunday afternoon, Immersion participants will have an opportunity to “choose your own adventure” from a selection of 2-hour mini-workshops led by guest speakers, who are experts in their fields and have unique perspectives to offer to the compassion community.
Compassion as a Way of Life
with Neelama Eyres & Robert Cusick
This deeply experiential workshop explores compassion not simply as a feeling or concept, but as a skillful way of relating to suffering in ourselves, others, and the world. Drawing from contemplative wisdom traditions and modern compassion science, participants will engage in guided reflection, meditation, writing exercises, and relational dialogue to explore three core dimensions of compassion: recognizing suffering, meeting suffering skillfully, and discerning compassionate action in real-life situations. Through both inner inquiry and interactive practices, participants will deepen awareness of their habitual responses to life’s difficulties, while cultivating a more grounded, skillful, and sustainable orientation toward compassion as a way of life.
Applied Compassion Mindset: A Practical Approach to Purpose, Self-Kindness, and Nutrition
with Maryam Makowski, PhD
An experiential session exploring how self-compassion can transform our relationship with food, nourishment, and well-being within busy, high-demand lives. Participants will explore practical and realistic approaches to healthy eating, recognizing that sustainable nourishment may look different for each person. The session will also examine common barriers to self-care in high-performance environments and how compassionate awareness can support more sustainable, energizing habits without perfectionism, shame, or guilt.
Mindsets, Contemplative Practices, and Embodied Awareness
with Kris Evans, PhD(c)
This experiential session explores the science of mindsets. The first half of the session will introduce recent research on how our beliefs influence attention, emotion, physiology, and behavior. Participants will learn about the power of mindsets and the psychological processes that help us recognize, work with, and intentionally shift them.
The second half of the session will move from theory to embodied practice through contemplative practices using yoga, breathwork, reflection, and guided awareness exercises. Participants will cultivate the presence, awareness, and flexibility needed to notice internal narratives, regulate unhelpful mindsets, and choose ways of relating to stress, challenge, themselves, and others that support health, resilience, compassion, and aligned action.
Compassion Training for Healthcare Workers
with Diana Adams, EdD, Sara Owens Woodard, PhD, and Bornali Basu, PhD
When Dr. Diana Adams initially mentioned teaching a class on compassion, many MDs and psychologists responded, “I don’t need to become more compassionate, I need to learn to be less compassionate”. What they were saying is that, “I am overwhelmed by the suffering I see and experience”. They are describing empathic distress–the absorbing of suffering. This causes our brains to light up our centers for pain and our viscera/gut. We are not meant to experience this and hold on to it. Rather, by learning the formal 8-week compassion cultivation practice, we can learn a different way of relating to suffering. We can breathe in the suffering and transform it within us and breathe out compassion. When we do this, we quiet the pain and visceral centers in our brains and now engage our self/other distinction areas of the brain. Our motivation center tells us to approach and help, and our reward center lights up. This transformation is healing and nourishes us. It counteracts what is commonly thought of as compassion fatigue and burnout.
During the Immersion, Dr. Adams will be joined by Dr. Sara Owens Woodard and Dr. Bornali Basu to lead a session focused on one aspect of her 8-week Compassion Training for Health Care Workers program: cultivating loving-kindness toward oneself.
Human Capacity, Self-Compassion, and Sustainable Performance
with Sarah Deane & Al’ai Alvarez, MD
High-demand environments don’t just challenge us; they drain the energy we rely on to think clearly, regulate emotions, stay compassionate, and show up well for ourselves and others. In this interactive session, participants will learn how self-compassion and intentional energy management can help them sustain their capacity in the moments that demand the most from them. Energy management means understanding what drains and restores your mental, emotional, and physical capacity, then making practical choices that protect, renew, and direct that energy toward what matters most. Drawing on MEvolution’s energy framework and compassion research, participants will leave with greater awareness of their own energy patterns, simple strategies for interrupting perfectionism and depletion, and healthier rhythms that support resilience, recovery, and sustainable performance at work and in life.
Compassion Quest: A Campus Adventure in Connection
Self-guided
A team-based experiential adventure across campus designed to cultivate connection, curiosity, reflection, and compassion through shared experiences. Participants will explore the campus in small groups of 4–5 while engaging in interactive challenges, reflective prompts, and collaborative activities centered on empathy, mindfulness, gratitude, and human connection. Blending movement, conversation, and playful exploration, this experience invites participants to slow down, engage more intentionally with one another, and discover moments of compassion in unexpected places.